Extreme weather hits hard, costs taxpayers billions

Kirsty Duncan is a Liberal member of parliament (Etobicoke North) and critic for the Environment. She has a Ph.D. in geography (University of Edinburgh, 1992) and has taught meteorology, climatology, and climate change at the University of Windsor, corporate social responsibility and medical geography at the University of Toronto and global environmental processes at Royal Roads University. She served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization that won the 2007 Nobel Prize with Al Gore and is the author of Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist’s Search for a Killer Virus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), and Environment and Health: Protecting our Common Future (2008).

While the Harper government deployed Canadian diplomats to lobby Fortune 500 companies in the United States to counter a global warming campaign, 2011 proved to be the year of weather extremes in the States. In fact, fourteen extreme weather events caused losses of US$1 billion each. The worst tornado outbreak in history hit the southern states, with April recording a staggering 753 tornadoes, and beating the previous monthly record of 542 by a startling 39%.

The United States was not alone. Rainfall records were set in Australia, Japan and Korea, whereas the Yangtze Basin in China experienced record drought.

Evidence shows that heatwaves and precipitation extremes will greatly increase in frequency and severity with a warming climate, have already done so, and that recent record-breaking temperatures for June are what we would expect from climate change.

putting in place adaptation measures necessary to respond to the risks of climate change.

The Prime Minister’s opposition toward action on climate change is well known; before he ever took office, he once described the Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist plot”. Despite this negativity and his government’s unabated rhetoric regarding a carbon tax, the Prime Minister did previously promise a price on carbon of $65 per tonne.

However, Canadians and the world need more than denial, scepticism, and broken promises.

For many of the world’s poorest countries, climate change is not an academic, esoteric debate, but rather a pressing reality faced every day. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels threaten farmland and water supply, despite the fact that its population of 160 million emits less greenhouse gases than Manhattan; in the future, a one-metre, sea-level rise will submerge one-fifth of Bangladesh’s land mass and displace 20 million people.

The conservative government must accept the science of climate change. This means that the government must ensure that Environment Canada’s programmes and scientists are fully funded to support scientific excellence, and that they, in turn, have the freedom to discuss their research with the taxpayers who fund them. It does not mean, for example, making an investment of $148 million in climate adaptation, and then gutting the climate impacts and adaptation group—many of whom share the 2007 Nobel Prize as IPCC scientists, and who undertook cutting-edge research.

Canadians should be weary of the government’s tired lines on climate change: “We have a plan, an action plan and it is working.” There is no plan, just final stages of writing new regulations for coal-fired electricity, and only beginning consultations with the oil sands, cement, gas and steel industries. The government is proposing a sector-by-sector approach meant to delay, rather than develop a comprehensive climate change strategy to reduce the expected annual $21-43 billion adaptation costs by 2050.

The government should therefore table a comprehensive climate change plan; commit to attaining the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals that it has supported internationally; and contribute its fair share to fill the megatonne gap (i.e., the shortfall between existing mitigation commitments and the emissions reductions necessary to prevent serious climate change).

More stringent actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions cannot be postponed much longer. Otherwise the opportunity to keep the average global temperature rise below 2° C is in danger, and serious impacts are associated with this limit, including an increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, shifts in growing seasons and sea level rise.

The government must: recognize that non-renewable, high-carbon energy sources are unsustainable, and that Canada must plan for a transition to more sustainable energy sources; recognize the need for a national sustainable energy and economic growth strategy to position Canada to succeed in the global economy; and develop a pan-Canadian sustainable energy strategy with goals and targets for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and transportation.

This will require meaningful engagement of all stakeholders, and tough questions about the government’s management of the oil sands. Where is the long-term plan? What action has been taken to regulate the pace and scale of development? What progress has been made to protect air quality, boreal forest ecosystems, and water resources? What assessments are being undertaken to investigate the potential human health impacts of development? What solutions is the government considering — including, requiring best available technologies to reduce air emissions, and prohibiting water withdrawals during low-flow periods?

Finally, the government must stop embarrassing Canadians on the world stage. Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto sparked the following outrage: a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry told reporters that the decision was “regrettable and flies in the face of the efforts of the international community”. A spokesman for France’s foreign ministry called the move “bad news for the fight against climate change”; and Tuvalu’s lead negotiator said, “For a vulnerable country like Tuvalu, it’s an act of sabotage on our future …Withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol is a reckless and totally irresponsible act.”

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.